The students hiked the Kayenta trail to the Emerald Pools. Credit: T. Hall

This is the Court of the Patriarchs, so named for figures from the Old Testament by Frederick Vining Fisher in 1916. Abraham Peak is on the far left. Isaac Peak is in the center. Jacob Peak is the white peak that can be viewed just beyond Mount Moroni on the right.

View of The Narrows, a trail that winds through slot canyons in the famously cross-bedded Navajo Sandstone.

The Wooster crew cools off in the Virgin River at the end of an awesome day in Zion. Credit: T. Wilch

CATANIA, SICILY, ITALY–Today we had our last field trip associated with the 2013 International Bryozoology Conference. We traveled to the east coast of Sicily at Castelluccio, which is south of Catania and north of Syracuse. The weather could not have been better. It was, as a commenter has said, “impossibly beautiful”.

The view above is of Early Pleistocene limestones resting on tholeitic basalt flows. As our guides said, in this place we could see the interplay of extensional tectonics, regional uplift, and glacially-controlled sea-level changes. The visuals were stunning. In the background you can see the east flank of Mount Etna.The limestones were of shallow-water origin and very diverse. One layer was almost completed bioturbated (biologically stirred up) by crustaceans, producing a trace fossil of connected tunnels called Thalassinoides.Fossils were abundant in some units. Here is an horizon rich in scallop shells. These shells are often preferentially preserved because they are made of hardy calcite rather than chemically unstable aragonite like most other mollusk skeletons.The interactions between the basalt flows and the calcareous sediments were fascinated. Above you see a black basaltic dike cutting vertically through the limestones. Why there are no visible baked zones is a mystery to me.In this image we have basalt above and sediments below. The pink color of the limestones tells us they were cooked by the hot lava that flowed over them.There are a variety of post-depositional geological processes operating at this outcrop. One of them is the superimposition of beachrock during sea-level highstands. Beachrock is a cemented sediment formed in the surf zone by precipitation of carbonate. This particular beachrock was plastered onto an eroded limestone cliff like stucco. You can see black basalt among the diverse clasts.Over it all rules Mount Etna, here viewed from the top of the outcrop. It was unusually smoky today, which does not show well in our photographs because of the murky haze. We headed to this behemoth for the second and last stop of our field trip.

ICELAND – Team Iceland is nearly ready to return to the states, but not before we share what we’ve learned with the Icelandic community. Our home-away-from-home, the Hraunbyrgi guesthouse, is also home for the Hafnarfjörður scouts. To celebrate the end of their season, the scouts are having a large, nationwide camp-out at a site just south of the pillow quarries. So, for their final meeting, the scouts met with Team Iceland to learn about our research.

Dr. Ben Edwards shows the local scouts a sample of pillow basalt.

The scouts learned that they’ll be camping along a ridge made of pillow basalts, which formed when lava erupted under a glacier. They also heard about the kinds of information that we can learn from the pillow basalts, like how the upper portion of the ocean floor is formed and how thick the ice was that once covered the Reykjanes Peninsula. The scouts returned the favor and taught Team Iceland a few new Icelandic words. What a fantastic way to end a successful field season!

It’s actually a wall of welded bombs and spatter. These blobs of lava were ejected explosively during an eruption and fused to one another on the rim of the cone.

Kyle Burden (’14), shown here taking careful notes, will be working on the welded bomb wall using an approach similar to the one Team Iceland used on pillow lavas. He’ll be collecting high-resolution images with a GigaPan and making careful measurements of bombs across the exposure.

After a morning on the cinder cones, we descended into the lava fields.

Candy Thornton (’14) contemplates her field area. She’ll be documenting features in the lava flows to determine whether they inflated as they were emplaced.

One of the features that Candy will be studying are these striae, which are grooves that formed on the sides of a mound called a tumulus. The striae indicate that the interior of the mound moved up relative to the outer crust while the lava was partially molten.

CATANIA, SICILY, ITALY–They may look like impressive sea stacks to you, but it turns out these are three huge stones thrown by the aggrieved and wounded cyclops Polyphemus at Odysseus as he escaped that infernal cave. Who knew?

This morning we traveled north of Catania to the Ciclopi Marine Protected Area near Aci Castello and Aci Trezza to look at the evidence of the ancient volcanic activity that led to Mount Etna, and to snorkel and dive on the life-encrusted rocks in the blue, blue waters.

We took a boat ride all of about 300 meters across the bay to the tiny island of Lachea, shown above. Notice that there is a crack running through the rocks seen just above the boat. This is an active fault that runs through the middle of the island. Also note that there is a mix of light and dark rocks visible.

Lachea is a combination of whitish marls and claystones above with black basalt injected from below. This is the very beginning of volcanic activity in this region as hot magma began to work its way into the overlying sediments of a shallow sea. When the lava erupted onto the seafloor, masses of pillow basalts formed (see previous post). The cyclopean rocks in the top image are eroded roots of the massive basalt flows. They show beautiful columnar jointing.

From Lachea we can see the glowering outline of Mount Etna, the true giant in our story.

The island of Lachea and its surrounding rocks has been the site of a research station for over a century. The fauna and flora of both the island and the seafloor down to 110 meters are protected by law.

This pretty green lizard is common on Lachea and apparently endemic (found only there). It is Podarcis sicula ciclopica. Its mating season of three months is about to begin, so there was much lizardly activity.

One of the first places we visited on the island was this tiny historical grotto. Only five of us could crawl into this completely dark chamber at a time. Once inside you can carefully stand up and (at least some of us) touch your head on the ceiling. That turned out to be a mistake because the guiding biologists then show you the unique cave spiders hanging on their webs about your ears!

Finally I must show you at least one of our large Sicilians lunches, this one back in Catania after our morning marine excursion. We are eating well, if a bit later than usual — and with much more time in the process!

Thrihnukagigur has three volcanic peaks, one of which is a cinder cone with a crater that opens up into a 400 ft deep volcanic chamber. Our goal was to explore the chamber for units and structures that might be analogous to the features we observed in the quarries. The tour began with a 2 mile hike to the volcano over lava flows that were 4,000 and 10,000 years old.

View of Thrihnukagigur Cone from the surrounding lava fields. The Inside the Volcano tour has a warm hut at the base of the cone. (The white structure is difficult to see against the field of snow). Photo Credit: Ellie Was

At the hut, we were fitted with safety equipment for our descent into the volcano. Photo Credit: Liz Plascencia

We crossed this bridge to get into the open-air basket that took us into the volcanic chamber. Photo Credit: Ellie Was

The view down the open volcanic neck from the basket. Photo Credit: Ellie Was

We saw some features that are analogous to our quarry observations. Here, on the left, we see a contact between the dark underlying Moberg Formation and the colorful overlying lavas that make up much of the volcanic center. The black vertical rocks near the center of the photo are dikes that cut across the lava flows. The dikes have heated and altered the surrounding rocks, turning them red.

This appears to be an irregularly shaped intrusion with an open cavity that might have transported magma to different parts of the volcano during the eruption. Notice the person in the center bottom for scale.

Did I mention that we battled driving sleet and 45 mph winds to hike to and from the volcano? Here’s part of our group linking arms to stay on their feet as they hike back from the volcano. Our guides were superb and made sure everyone was safe during each part of our trip. Photo Credit: Liz Plascencia

ICELAND – Team Iceland made the most of the beautiful weather over the last two days. After spending all day in the field yesterday, we went back after dinner; the lighting was just right to take GigaPan images of the field site.

Aleks (’14, Dickinson) and Ben (Dickinson) set up the GigaPan to take a panoramic image of the quarry.

This is a simple panorama made of three images stitched together. The GigaPan system allows us to merge over 100 images to produce a high-resolution image.

Our plan is to couple the high-resolution GigaPan images with elevation information from the laser range finder. Here, Michael (’16, Wooster) and Ellie (’14, Dickinson) are recording the elevations of contacts along the quarry walls.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are mapping and sampling the different units. Adam (’16, Wooster) and Aleks (’14, Dickinson) are ready to sample a glassy pillow lava.

The puzzling features are associated with these steeply dipping pillow lavas, which might lead to some insights into the origin of the features and enhance our understanding of the formation of subglacial pillow ridges.

ICELAND – We spent Sunday morning discussing all of the features that we’ve seen during our reconnaissance investigations. After comparing notes, we defined several lithofacies, or mappable units with specific lithologic features. Our coherent lithofacies include pillow lavas, dikes, and intrusions while our fragmental lithofacies are units like volcanic breccia and lapilli tuff. By the end of the morning, Team Iceland was ready for their first group assignment: map a section of the quarry wall.

The students worked diligently to record comprehensive field notes.

Image of a pillow lava that shows some of the features the students were looking for: radial columnar joints, glassy rind, and interbedded hyaloclastite.

The students celebrated the completion of their mission with lunch by large mining equipment.

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – On Tuesday, Team Utah visited the Core Research Center at the Utah Geological Survey. The repository includes cores and cuttings from more than 4000 wells, on-site microscope facilities, and a friendly and knowledgeable staff. We suspect that the sedimentary xenoliths that Kevin has been finding represent Lake Bonneville sediments. Tom Dempster and Peter Nielsen pulled out some cuttings for us to look at and set up the microscope. Mark Gwynn showed us some core that they recently recovered from an area near our study site.

Kevin examines some cuttings under a binocular microscope and projects the image so that we can discuss it as a group.

We also had the chance to meet with Amanda Hintz, a UGS geologist with an expertise in the Black Rock Desert.

Amanda so graciously gave us part of her day to answer our questions about bombs, xenoliths, lava flows, and faulting.

Finally, Stephanie Earls, the UGS Research Librarian, was so helpful in finding historic aerial photographs for us.

After a productive day at the research center, we visited Bingham Canyon on the way out of town.

View of the Bingham Canyon mine from the visitor's center.

Although it make for a long day and a late night, our trip to Salt Lake City was instrumental in helping us think about our field area as we wrap up our field season. Thanks to all of the folks at the UGS for their help!